Kurtis's Blog

I read in the news today that my hyped music service Spotify will be launched today. I have been a beta-tester for some time, and I have really come to like the GUI and the entire concept. I was first very skeptical to the on-line music playing idea - but to be honest you forget about it. It works really well and the GUI beats iTunes if you ask me. Both for usability and speed BTW. I am glad to see that there still is innovation...

Ok, so I haven't posted to frequently here so I thought I have to pick up writing again. So here goes a completely off-topic posting to start of a few posting that will come today. I have now had I am from Barcelona songs in my head for almost two weeks.

This years large Internet conference in Sweden has started. This is the 9th year it's held and I think I have spoken at all but the very first one. The quality of sessions have varied over the years, but I must admit that I think that this year has the strongest program so far.

In the opening keynotes, it was interesting to hear the minister of IT, Åsa Torstensson talk about the need for IPv6, and the role that the government can play as a large customer in creating demand. Good news!

On Sunday, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt wrote about how Sweden risk falling behind developing nations. I completely agree with this.

Sweden was an early adopter for ICT development and build out. The city fiber network in Stockholm, Stokab, has long been seen as a role model for build out of new networks, and cheap, neutral access. Sweden also has had a very high broadband penetration and number of PCs per capita.

However, this is soon all in the past tense. Sweden has for a long time sat still and viewed it self in the mirror, quite pleased. In the mean time the world has moved on. Vint Cert, at a dinner on Sunday told me a good english saying, "I waited for you to catchup so long I didn't realize you where ahead of me". I believe that is what we are seeing. Swedish politicians, policy makers and industry, have kept looking at nice statistics, but stopped developing.

In the mean time, new European member states, and Asian countries have passed us, or is about too. Many of these were perhaps always ahead, such as South Korean and Japan. But what is more worrying, is that we in Sweden have become locked in discussing the infrastructure it self, and have for many years discussed how to bring infrastructure to the last citizen. Often the discussions have also centered on how end-user pricing for that infrastructure can be harmonized. I.e the same cost everywhere. The infrastructure itself, once it reaches a critical point, is not interesting. The development of new applications and services that use it is where the future growths are. This is where we will see new companies and multinationals form. Once the infrastructure is at critical mass, which it is once the major cities are covered, development of new services will drive demand for infrastructure.

We now need to see what can be done to facilitate growth of new services and applications, how can we make sure that we will get the new companies form here? In the .com era, the nordic countries used the early adoption to their advantage, but since then we have been standing still while the rest of the world have moved forward fast. Carl in his blog post bring up Estonia, where the government have developed new services, and by that made sure there is a market to build on. Estonia and the former soviet block countries have an advantage in that they don't have several hundred years of legacy bureaucracy, so they can develop and adopt faster. We need to adopt to a world that moves faster, and that develop services faster, or we risk becoming legacy and irrelevant.

At a panel debate today at Internetdagarna, it's quite telling that the only application that was brought up for the infrastructure was "home-heal-and-safty" alarms. It a critical application, but not what you will build a new success story on. We need to get away from the regional development policy discusions and focus on what the service companies need and what the government can do.

And we need to do so quite fast!